Linux

[pierrot]

Yes, software that's maintained by volunteers instead of by the original creators themselves tend to be slightly behind the most current releases. Despite its reputation, Fedora isn't really bleeding edge. Packages are more up-to-date than Ubuntu, but less so than Arch. This is to ensure that no new update will break your system.

Yeah, I'm noticing that to be the case fairly regularly, which I guess makes sense as an offshoot of RHEL. I don't really mind having releases held back to test for stability if there are actually people auditing them for when to be pushed to Fedora users (and I'll just choose to assume the volunteers are actually putting any thought into it, not just pushing something when it's X versions behind the latest release). It is a little confusing when the Fedora project has that "First" pillar of their mission statement. I don't really need the bleeding edge nightlies or anything, though, for sure.

Not sure exactly what I'll do with Julia yet. I think I'll have to get the Arduino IDE manually anyway, so I might just deal with those and possibly some other similar stuff on my own. Might end up depending a little bit on how much I use some of the software.

[pierrot]

Well, my desktop is now also on Fedora. Yesterday I blew away the Windows 10 install and did a fresh Fedora 41 install with the Fedora Everything ISO. Went with the KDE desktop manager (regretting it a little bit), and basically nothing else but the VLC option. I've gotten it mostly set up for my daily use, but I can't use my previous VPN on Fedora, KDE doesn't have a simple method of adding JP input like GNOME does, I'm getting a weird random flickering bar along the top of the screen when playing videos or games even though it seems like that's an issue for NVIDIA drivers on linux for this GPU series and I have nouveau installed, and just a number of other kind of unreliable GUI stuff that sound like they're related to KDE environment.

The main thing right now is that I need to get JP input working (I never really realize how much I use it until I don't have it), and I'm not really feeling great about the prospect of being able to play FFXI on here--. Right now I'm having an issue with Windower crashing when trying to initialize, but even just launching vanilla, the performance seems to be similarly awkward like what I was seeing on SteamDeck. It's basically unplayable without GearSwap scripts for me anyway, though.

I haven't totally decided yet, but I am starting to think about loading in GNOME instead of KDE now. I'm gonna give it a little time to dwell on, though. I also might go ahead and try to install the NVIDIA drivers through the RPMFusion repo.

[o.pwuaioc]

Well, my desktop is now also on Fedora. Yesterday I blew away the Windows 10 install and did a fresh Fedora 41 install with the Fedora Everything ISO. Went with the KDE desktop manager (regretting it a little bit), and basically nothing else but the VLC option. I've gotten it mostly set up for my daily use, but I can't use my previous VPN on Fedora, KDE doesn't have a simple method of adding JP input like GNOME does, I'm getting a weird random flickering bar along the top of the screen when playing videos or games even though it seems like that's an issue for NVIDIA drivers on linux for this GPU series and I have nouveau installed, and just a number of other kind of unreliable GUI stuff that sound like they're related to KDE environment.

The main thing right now is that I need to get JP input working (I never really realize how much I use it until I don't have it), and I'm not really feeling great about the prospect of being able to play FFXI on here--. Right now I'm having an issue with Windower crashing when trying to initialize, but even just launching vanilla, the performance seems to be similarly awkward like what I was seeing on SteamDeck. It's basically unplayable without GearSwap scripts for me anyway, though.

I haven't totally decided yet, but I am starting to think about loading in GNOME instead of KDE now. I'm gonna give it a little time to dwell on, though. I also might go ahead and try to install the NVIDIA drivers through the RPMFusion repo.

I didn't realize KDE was so deficient! But before you switch to Gnome, have you looked to see if there were guides for this? Plenty of common problems have folks on forums providing a step-by-step solution. I saw at least one on Reddit suggesting a way of getting a JP IME working on KDE.

For what it's worth, I never had an issue with Japanese input on either Gnome or XFCE.

[pierrot]

Oh, I wasn't planning on making any desktop manager changes immediately, but I had already found some discussion about adding JP input with KDE yesterday. It just requires a bit of setup, and I hadn't gotten around to it yet. It's just that in GNOME I literally only had to click into keyboard input methods > add > select the IME-style JP input method, and I was done.

Edit: LMAO, I just had about one of the most Linux moments possible where I blew away my entire desktop following this guide at the optional instruction to remove the maliit framework and keyboard, since they're supposed to be for mobile deployments. I guess I'll need to pay a bit more attention, because dnf pulled in a whole bunch of dependencies to delete with them, and I only glanced over it, but there were a few that looked like they had "plasma" in them. That's my bad--. Is there a way to tell dnf to not remove certain dependencies when removing a package? I figured my only two options were always just, 'let dnf do its thing,' and 'abort entirely.' Would be a lot nicer to have some more granular control over that.

Glad I at least have enough command of the CLI to get my desktop back from the command line. Starting to kind of wonder if I just want to use a window manager instead of a desktop environment now, though--.

[o.pwuaioc]

Edit: LMAO, I just had about one of the most Linux moments possible where I blew away my entire desktop following this guide at the optional instruction to remove the maliit framework and keyboard, since they're supposed to be for mobile deployments. I guess I'll need to pay a bit more attention, because dnf pulled in a whole bunch of dependencies to delete with them, and I only glanced over it, but there were a few that looked like they had "plasma" in them. That's my bad--. Is there a way to tell dnf to not remove certain dependencies when removing a package? I figured my only two options were always just, 'let dnf do its thing,' and 'abort entirely.' Would be a lot nicer to have some more granular control over that.

Yeah, dependencies can get tricky. I abandoned Cinnamon because too many of what I would consider bloatware would take the whole DE with it if I tried to remove them. If you know everything you need to remove, you can add --noautoremove argument when removing packages:

Code: Select all

sudo dnf remove --noautoremove maliit-framework maliit-framework-qt5

Edit: Found this super relevant SuperUser link: https://superuser.com/questions/1423584 ... -unrelated

Seems there's a more permanent fix.

[pierrot]

Oh, nice! Good to know there's some better ways to hopefully keep that from happening again. Thanks for the info!

Mainly back to just say after a number of weeks with Fedora on my desktop and laptop, I've gotten things pretty much setup to function as my Windows systems did, with some minor jank around the edges. Mainly it feels related to KDE, though, which I really do not care for, but I've also kind of gotten used to at this point. I still sort of intend to move over to Gnome on my desktop, but on my laptop I still have it basically just stock Gnome despite pulling in the tweaks and extension managers.

Either way, both systems work for about everything I need them to do right now. I did get kind of sidetracked by my browser fingerprint for a while, but I think I have things configured about how I'd like. I haven't really done anything with SELinux. It sounds like it's somewhat configured out of the box, and specific changes would just be for more specific security needs on more enterprise deployments.

Only real 'pain points' for me right now are that FFXI runs, but has kind of similar inconsistent performance to what I saw with the steam deck, and my Retrobit Saturn controller doesn't seem to really work at all in D-Input mode. I can change it to X-input, and it works pretty well that way in most games, but there are some cases where it has some weird results, or not the level of support I'd like (Steam input also seems a little quirky with it). That's pretty much just me installing the shooters, b'mups, and some 2D platformers on my desktop to make it into a bit of an arcade machine, though. There are a handful of them that I need to make some some adjustments to in order to get them running a little better, but 90% of them go off pretty much without a hitch.

It's a pretty stable system (KDE not withstanding), and most of my gaming needs are met with it, so I'm pretty much all set. I was able to build my VPN from a package in their git artifacts too.

Oh, I will say that while trying to do some things with an 8Bitdo Ultimate Wireless controller that's been demonstrating a faulty wireless receiver for some time, I was trying to figure out CLI commands for mounting and unmounting USB devices only to find out that for some reason the usbutils package in Fedora doesn't come with usbreset for some reason (I ended up building it from source and having it not really be that helpful for me) which I kind of overreacted to and had thoughts about moving over to Arch for a hot minute. I probably won't ever end up doing that, but the thought sort of lives in the back of my mind now--.

Thanks for the company while I got this stuff going, o.pwuaioc.

[o.pwuaioc]

Can't really help with FFXI, but always happy to help. And honestly, glad to see others make the switch, so if you have questions, observations, or fun stories, I'm all for it.

[pierrot]

The long awaited update:

I've been pretty locked to my laptop for a number of weeks now due to moving, and have gotten in a lot more reps with GNOME. Long story short is that I honestly find it to be so much better than KDE it's not even close. My main issue with GNOME is that I have to use extensions to really get it functioning more how I like, and that relies on people maintaining those extensions (which was somewhat of an issue when upgrading to Fedora 42, but I escaped relatively unscathed), but I intend to switch over to GNOME once I'm set up with my desktop PC in operation again.

Currently my extensions look like:

App Icons Taskbar
AppIndicator and KStatusNotifier item Support (I might need to look at this again, I don't remember why I have it)
ArcMenu (Set to Enterprise menu layout)
Auto Move Windows (really don't use this for much)
Blur my Shell
Caffeine
Disable Unredirect (just fixes a bug with Hide Top Bar)
Hide Top Bar
Open .desktop file location (nice convenience)
Vitals (nice convenience)

If Hide Top Bar would work with the top bar moved to the bottom of the screen, it would be just about perfect, but alas it causes the mouse cursor to get stuck at the bottom of the screen.

Anyway, I do not absolutely love GNOME although I do find it works quite well for a laptop DE. So, while I was kind of keeping an eye out for the next major release of Budgie for changing to on my desktop PC, I'm now quite interested in COSMIC. It looks quite nice, and I'll probably go with it once it hits a major release.

I do also want to get just basic window managers on both computers as backups, but I haven't gotten around to it on my laptop.

Kind of tangential, but I also got GrapheneOS set up. Haven't quite actually migrated to that phone yet, but it's moving along slowly but surely. The main thing I'm trying to figure out is if I can get my service switched over to an eSIM.

[opa]

I enjoyed catching up on the linux chatter (late though I may be).

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that my next PC is going to be a Linux machine. Not sure if I'm going to build it myself or find a pre-built with compatible parts.

I think with the popularity of the Steam Deck furthering game compatibility it's a pretty safe option at this point.

Just need to find time to do a bunch of research. lol

[opa]

I am now an owner of an HP Prodesk 400 G3 Mini PC. The seller had originally put Windows 11 on it (and it ran okay) but I swapped to Linux Mint (cinnamon). I'll use it to brush up on my coding skills. I enjoyed learning Python/C++ but didn't have an opportunity to continue studying at the time. Hope to rectify that with a dedicated machine. I already installed Thonny as my Python IDE (a pretty simple, no-frills environment).

What distros are y'all currently using? I believe this is the first time I've tried Linux Mint. Seems pretty sleek with a tasteful / minimalist design.